Charcuterie Board
In this project I was really trying to learn more about materials and photorealism. This was almost going to just be an experimental piece but as I kept adding to it, the scene was eventually able to stand on it’s own. I knew I wanted to do something with food since I don’t really have a lot of experience with modeling food and I figured one of the more challenging foods to make look photorealistic is fruit. So I ended up messing with the grapes a lot to begin with until I got them looking just right. I also created my own textures for this project that came from photographs I took.
The two images above show the early experiments with sub surface scattering effects. This was a tricky thing to get right in Redshift as there seem to be quite a lot of settings and options. I decided to play with the scatter scale, transmittance colors and scatter coefficients to get the effects I wanted. With the cheese shown on the right, I wanted to be sure that the rinds also were picked up. I thought about even making the rind a separate object with different sub surface properties from the cheese itself but perhaps that’ll be for another project.
The grapes were tricky too and I had to use a material blender node in Redshift to add on the dirt and condensation otherwise the grapes would have looked too artificial. The image to the right shows early renders of the the grapes with sub surface scattering applied. This was when I was trying to tune the right colors and transmittance before I moved on to adding the dirt.
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- Cutting board with custom photo material rendered in Substance Painter
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- Plate using photo material rendered in Substance Painter
Lastly, with this project I experimented with creating realistic materials from photographs that I took. I created the cutting board from a cutting board I have around my house and the plate texture was created from an image of a plate we have as well. I wanted to introduce some cracking into the mix to make the plate look older as well.
I really enjoyed experimenting in this project and learning how to use the material blender node in Redshift and gained some confidence with it. Overall, this project served as a great experiment that turned into an actual piece on my reel and I learned a lot about sub surface materials and think it’s such a fun trick to achieve realism with wax, food or any other translucent materials that scatter light inside of them.